The Safety of Objects
Directed by Rose Troche
Where to Watch The Safety of Objects
- CrossCutCritic30 april 2025What’s Left After the Beautiful Things Break --- It’s the kind of neighborhood that looks like a memory. Trim hedges. Playgrounds. SUVs. A trampoline in every other backyard. Children’s drawings on the fridge. Half-finished remodels. Marriages built on schedules and softly decaying vows. A soundtrack of grocery lists, quiet panic, and silent longing. The Safety of Objects doesn’t mock these places. It mourns them. It’s a film made of quiet collisions — of people who are supposed to be fine. But they’re not. And that’s the point. --- The film weaves together the lives of several suburban families: A mother (Glenn Close) devoted to her son, who lies in a coma. A lawyer (Dermot Mulroney) chasing youth through an affair. A woman (Patricia Clarkson) clinging to consumer routines while her marriage bleeds out. A teenage boy (Joshua Jackson) testing the edges of emotional survival. No one is villainous. Everyone is fragile. There’s no explosive tragedy. Just the slow corrosion of connection — the ache that comes when life doesn’t fall apart suddenly, but quietly slips out the side door when no one’s watching. --- What Troche captures — and what A.M. Homes’s stories already knew — is that grief doesn’t always look like mourning. Sometimes it looks like shopping. Sometimes it looks like moving on too fast. Sometimes it looks like talking to a dollhouse like it’s a lover. Sometimes it’s a brother shaving his legs because he can’t admit he misses his sister. It’s all absurd. And true. And terribly familiar. --- There’s an Augustinian thread running through it, even if unnamed. That strange truth he once wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Here, every character is restless. They reach for affairs, consumer goods, drugs, lawsuits, distractions. But nothing holds. The objects aren’t safe anymore. They were never meant to be. --- There’s a scene with Glenn Close — no spoilers — where you realize she hasn’t just lost her son to a coma. She’s losing herself. Not dramatically. But incrementally, with every morning that the world continues without him. She tries to fix it. By holding. By letting go. By bargaining. By remembering too much and not enough. It doesn’t work. But something else starts to happen in the margins: not victory, not healing exactly, but… surrender. And in that surrender, the faint breath of grace. --- The theology here is cruciform, though the cross is never named. It’s in the unchosen suffering. In the love that clings even after meaning dissolves. In the truth that no amount of perfection, performance, or purchase can fill the absence where someone once was. The God in The Safety of Objects is not the God of the mega-church or the miracle ending. He is the God who hides in hospital rooms. The God who waits in the silence between mothers and sons. The God who knows what it’s like to be discarded, like an object, and who still whispers love anyway. --- By the end, nothing has been solved. But something has changed. The ache is still there. But it’s been named. And what is named can be carried. Not fixed. Carried. --- The Safety of Objects isn’t for everyone. But for those who know the grief of things not lost but quietly broken — the grief of homes that look whole from the street — it is a mirror. And maybe, if you lean in, it’s also a crack in the mirror where the light comes through.
The Safety of Objects Trivia
The Safety of Objects was released on 25 juli 2002.
The Safety of Objects was directed by Rose Troche.
The Safety of Objects has a runtime of 2 u, 1 m.
The Safety of Objects was produced by Dorothy Berwin, Christine Vachon.
In een voorstedelijk landschap zijn de levens van verschillende gezinnen verweven met verlies, wanhoop en persoonlijke crisis. Esther Gold heeft de focus verloren op alles behalve de zorg voor haar comateuze zoon, Paul, en verwaarloost haar dochter en echtgenoot. Advocaat Jim Train is toegewijd aan zijn carrière, niet aan zijn gezin. Helen Christianson wil een nieuwe vonk in het leven vinden, terwijl Annette Jennings het hare opnieuw probeert op te bouwen.
The key characters in The Safety of Objects are Esther Gold (Glenn Close), Jim Train (Dermot Mulroney), Julie Gold (Jessica Campbell).
The Safety of Objects is rated R.
The Safety of Objects is a Drama film.
The Safety of Objects has an audience rating of 6.5 out of 10.
The Safety of Objects has made US$ 453K at the box office.